For all but the youngest residents of Montreal, the events and images are still vivid: millions of people without power or heat; thousands in overcrowded shelters; the military called in to provide support; everything enveloped in a thick layer of glistening ice. One of the most devastating natural disasters in Canadian history, the ice storm […]

Montreal writer Johanna Skibsrud’s last name couldn’t be more appropriate. It is Norwegian, she told me recently in a crowded café near her home in the Mile End, and means “ship’s rudder.” It is appropriate because the central image of Skibsrud’s artful debut novel, The Sentimentalists, is a sailboat. Napoleon Haskell, father of the book’s […]